


Lo(o)se Threads

by Amemait



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: 'ame no', GFY, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-13
Updated: 2019-07-13
Packaged: 2020-06-27 12:29:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19790905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amemait/pseuds/Amemait
Summary: From the original tumblr post by whiskerknittles (here: https://whiskerknittles.tumblr.com/post/182335467412/garashir-fic-idea )Garashir fic ideaGarak is a tailor, but no ordinary one—he can see the red strings of fate that link everyone together. He snipped his own string years ago; better for he and whomever would have been his unfortunate companion, really. But when he sees Julian for the first time in Quark’s bar, the handsome and unbonded new doctor aboard the station… he wonders if, maybe, he might be able to trade in those old scissors for a needle.Artwork Here;https://whiskerknittles.tumblr.com/post/182858070672/the-quality-is-marginally-better-if-you





	1. Chapter 1

He’d learnt a long, long time ago not to mention the threads to others. Not just red, but a trailing tapestry stretched, threads of all hues spreading to other people.

He’d snipped his own, at first by accident - an incongruous twitch of the knife in his hand, a fraying, stretching, pulling, and finally a tear and break.

Pythas and he had never quite seen eye to eye from that point on.

Then he’d started to snip more deliberately, because…

The feeling was addictive, a sense of control he’d never had in his own life before. He couldn’t define it. He wanted more.

Until he was down to that one last red thread. He’d never met the one to whom this led. It stretched off to infinity, through the walls of Terok Nor, and in his darker moods he thought perhaps it led in the direction of the Federation. Ridiculous, of course.

Not everybody had red. Most had multiple colours. But red, red meant-

He snipped it last. All the better for his potential partner. Who could want a failure such as he for a Mate?

Too strong to cut cleanly with one pass of his blade, he’d failed to cut it close enough to his skin, and every now and then it peeked through the corners of his sight, growing and twisting lazily in an unseen wind.

He made and tailored clothes to match the tapestries of others, and his customer base was far wider than he’d expected.

Cardassia withdrew from the station. That was, he supposed, inevitable. But he remained, unwanted at home. A target for Bajorans wanting revenge, he’d expected, but mostly they paid him no mind.

Then the Federaji came, their uniforms clashing atrociously with their tapestry streamers.

Except.

One of them, a single red thread twisting lazily, unattached. Trying to spin and weave itself into others tapestries, always unravelling from them in the end.

The thread looked ragged, strong at the base as though well-cared for, but torn through the multitudes of careless attempts. He’d seen that before - some of the the Federaji Commander’s threads were singed at the ends, flaking ash in his wake when he’d first arrived on the station.

But to have only one thread in all the universe, that was…

Doctor Julian Bashir looked absurd in every outfit Garak tried to picture him in, the single red thread a waving condemnation. There was nothing to colour match, no tapestry of a happy lifetime to reflect, just a bleak canvas with a red line tracing across it, always reaching, trying to spin into something whole and never finding it.

It as almost hypnotic to watch. And Elim Garak wanted very much to complete the thread.


	2. Chapter 2

It was, Garak soon learned, worse than he’d thought.

His own threads had been willingly and indeed willfully snipped, cut off and cast aside as he might do the same to any fabric with its stitches not quite perfect as he wished.

Oh, but Julian Bashir’s hadn’t merely been snipped - it was as though they’d each been unceremoniously uprooted from his very being, by a gardener intent on a speedy theft and destruction of a rival’s plants, or as though someone were inexpert at pulling out weeds. He’d laid hands on the Doctor’s shoulders and could practically feel the holes where threads should grow. On his own scales they were flat, he’d cut his finely save for that red, and they’d merely not grown further.

That was one thing.

What he saw was quite another.

It wasn’t merely the attempts at romantic assignations which pulled at and frayed the thread.

No.

There was a rumour about the station that Doctor Bashir had saved a patient who should not have been saved, could not have been saved, that this made no sense.

Garak thought little of it even when he saw Doctor Bashir at lunch that day, his red thread shorter, more frayed. A trick of the memory, he’d assumed. Until he saw the patient leaving the station the next day, healthier than a man who the previous day had stood in Death’s Garden, that same hue of red a new and broken line running the width of his tapestry, two frayed edges sticking out the sides in a way that made the Tailor wince.

The Doctor’s thread unspooled itself a little further over the next few weeks, reaching the same length it was before that patient had been seen, but he did look so very tired, didn’t seem tempted to go out on another of his ill-fated attempts at romance.

The Tailor gave him a copy of the Never-Ending Sacrifice, and hoped he’d understand the more seditious of its themes - that service to others above caring for oneself was not in itself noble - but doubted he would.


	3. Chapter 3

A long time away, the Tailor had used what he could see as a tool. Looking at one person, finding their threads leading off into the distance, watching those whose tapestries intersected with others; the more unlikely the thread’s destination, the sweeter the discovery.

One person, early on in his life, he knew was a serial killer. Scraps of the threads of his victims woven raggedly into the trail like trophies, as the Doctor’s thread had been woven through that patient’s.

They’d found other, more tangible, trophies in his rooms.

That was a better use for his talents than blackmail, at least. Or worse.

The Tailor had once been many other things, less peaceful than one who worked with needle and thread. Less suited to peace.

The Doctor’s one thread brushed against his side as they walked together to lunch, seeking, perhaps for the connection with Garak’s own threads, narrowly missing his own streak of red.

Garak smiled at him, made his excuses, and left.

It wasn’t even a lie that he had to leave, that he couldn’t stomach lunch, that he couldn’t indulge this one-

This one weakness.

Now his long-ago mistakes were returning to hurt him.

And for some reason, he couldn’t bear the thought of Julian doing for him what he had for that other patient, of Julian tying off and snapping his own thread to keep him, Elim Garak, Tailor, Gardener, and so many other things besides, alive.


	4. Chapter 4

The Tailor had an eye for his craft, for the quality of a stitch and for the colour and strength of the thread used.

The Tailor awoke from a nightmare one-week-long, to find a thread twisted around his own, spun with his own line of red from the base of his own thread to the tip, elongating it, so that the ragged end came to a smooth cut, tidy as though it had been made by a scalpel, the barest hint of a colour transition shimmering along the length until at last it was solid and pure, a line red as human blood.

Longer than his thread had once been, it still came to an end.

His Doctor gazed at him from across the table as they spoke of inanities and novels and Elim Garak wanted to seize him by the shoulders and pull him near and demand he take back the lifeline he’d offered, extended, given while Elim had slept and then unceremoniously snipped off. He wanted to snarl in his face, to question, to demand, to interrogate out of his human Doctor with his horrendously human morals and his horribly human ideals and his monstrous lack of self-preservation-

-why-

Why would this Doctor, Julian Bashir with his one line of red, would just give up so much of himself, just for Garak-

Which of them was the more monstrous, the killer or the one who killed himself?

Those horrendously human morals were catching, Garak was disgusted to realised.

That tired gaze as Julian slowly unspooled more of himself, his thread growing slowly, never losing its lustre.

Elim caught Julian’s thread by a clawtip, just once. It twitched and flailed in an unseen unfelt breeze, and they stared at one-another as the thread wound itself around that clawtip. The moment was timeless and breathless and Elim wanted to lean forward across the table and kiss him as a human might express affection, love, lust, adoration, all the things he could feel pulling up his finger to his single remaining thread, following it down to the very core of his being. He’d snipped the others close enough to his skin that they couldn’t feel anything, but Julian’s had been ripped out from him from the root, he could see it, feel it in that moment.

He almost did kiss him, but the sheer unadulterated pain that echoed down from Julian’s thread shook him, shook the red line loose from his fingers, and the moment passed.

He’d touched other’s weaves before, it was impossible not to of course. But nothing had felt like Julian’s.

Later, as he examined the underside of his claws before bed, he saw it. A single brittle fragment of red, as though torn from the tip of Julian’s existence.

He placed it in an empty chocolate box and locked it away in his drawer.

And then he set the explosives in his shop.


	5. Chapter 5

Comm calls made the threads that followed a person distorted - these were, the tailor knew, not things which could be explained by technology, so they instinctively rejected trying to be viewed through its lens. But when Elim concentrates, he can still follow an individual thread if the need is great enough.

The need is great enough now.

Mila’s line to Tain is there. Solid and yet tenuous as ever.

Tain is alive. Wherever he is, Tain is alive.

And knowing where that thread is, the two people it leads to, Elim can find him.

–

Enabran Tain’s tapestry is a well-ordered mess of broken lives and their shredded lines, littering his path with the detritus of multiple deaths. They’re not strands but wires like the one deactivated and silent in the Tailor’s head, a life lived as a ligature around others’ throats. The Tailor wonders how it took him so long to see this.

He can pick out the line leading to Mila, and the line which once led to himself before the Tailor had clipped it off neatly and wished instead he’d burned it.

Elim has many causes and multiple times to wish Tain dead, and today has been one such day, multiple times over.

Every word the old man said, clearly calculated to cut him, as though Elim hadn’t snipped his own self into a new shape for this man, sliced through his own threads one by one.

Odo, he can see the line to their destination growing, changing, the end points his thickest line leading a direction away from their destination, and one even to the Romulan, and truthfully, the tailor should have realised the truths hidden here sooner.

But he’d been so grateful to Tain, so hateful of Tain, that he’d allowed himself to be blinded to the obvious.

But Enabran Tain is Mila’s love, is his own father - he’d promised his mother, white-haired and terrified on the other end of that commcall in a way he’d never seen her, that he would help his father. He’d promised. He’d sworn it.

Odo’s intervention was a mercy he didn’t deserve.

The sad part is that he is a very good tailor.


	6. Chapter 6

The day is ordinary.

The Doctor’s thread twists in an unseen unfelt breeze, then falls flat against his arm, reaching across the table.

He seems so tired.

The Tailor wants to take pity upon him, gather him up, take him to bed and have him rest.

It’s with a jolt he realises he’s in love with this soft scaleless human, with his single tattered thread spent on others and never on himself. That single thread is lightly resting on his own, twisting and braiding into a thing stronger than the sum of its parts.

The Tailor meets the Doctor’s gaze. He looks so tired, as though the fight has been stolen from him.

The Tailor unspools his own thread, hoping to lend his human love something resembling strength.

Julian might never more give up a part of himself to save others, but it was not always the best service to the State to sacrifice oneself.

Their thread shines in a solid line by the time their lunch is done. Julian looks a little more alive, and Elim gives him a kind smile, unwinding himself for this human.

And then that night he starts pursuing a Bajoran woman in Quark’s employ. Leeta.

The Tailor can’t blame him, he can appreciate someone made of vibrant and fun colours, trailing off to somber losses in her past, but he refuses to snap off the connection he’s made with Julian, merely to see him added to her delightful tapestry. He’ll make clothes for her wardrobe fit to outfit someone with far greater coin than she, but he’ll not give up his single connection to another for her.

It would seem that the Doctor does not feel the same.


End file.
